INST
384—322 BCE
Aristotle
亚里士多德
Provision, exchange, and the boundary between use and accumulation.
Back to Economics After AI
P02 / Online book / Part 01
Historical field / c. 4th century BCE—present
A Map of Economics
Read from top to bottom. The vertical direction marks historical sequence; the parallel rails follow recurring intellectual cores. Alongside these continuities, the REV badges mark the paradigm-level ruptures: the Smithian, marginal, Keynesian, monetarist, and rational-expectations revolutions. The map records conceptual continuities, not a claim that every later thinker was directly influenced by every earlier one.
Six recurring lines of inquiry
- CAPProduction & distribution
- EQChoice & equilibrium
- MACMoney & macro
- INSTInstitutions & information
- BEHBehavior & evidence
- EVOInnovation & evolution
- 00c. 4th century BCE—16th century
The ethical and political prehistory of economic thought
Wealth, exchange, money, taxation, and household rule were still questions inside ethics, law, and statecraft.
Other turning pointsXenophon · Scholastic just-price theory · Ibn Khaldun
- 011700—1776
Political economy becomes a system
The economy begins to appear as an interconnected circulation of production, income, prices, trade, and population.
Other turning pointsHume · Quesnay and the Tableau économique · Turgot
EVO
c. 1680s—1734
Richard Cantillon
理查德·坎蒂隆
Entrepreneurship, uncertainty, and the circulation of an interdependent economy.
CAP
1723—1790
Adam Smith
亚当·斯密
Division of labor, exchange, institutions, and commercial society.
- 021776—1867
REV 01 · The Smithian revolution
Classical political economy and its critique
Production, value, class distribution, accumulation, trade, and the historical character of capitalism move to the center.
Other turning pointsMalthus · Say · J. S. Mill · List
CAP
1772—1823
David Ricardo
大卫·李嘉图
Distribution, rent, relative costs, and comparative advantage.
CAP
1818—1883
Karl Marx
卡尔·马克思
Surplus value, capital accumulation, class, and technological change.
- 031871—1914
REV 02 · The marginal revolution
The marginal revolution and neoclassical consolidation
The unit of analysis shifts from social classes and surplus toward individual choice, scarcity, marginal trade-offs, and equilibrium; factor incomes become rewards to marginal productivity rather than outcomes of class relations.
Other turning pointsJevons · Walras · Edgeworth · Pareto
EQ
1840—1921
Carl Menger
卡尔·门格尔
Subjective value, marginal utility, and spontaneously evolved institutions.
EQ
1842—1924
Alfred Marshall
阿尔弗雷德·马歇尔
Supply, demand, elasticity, time, and partial equilibrium.
- 041890—1945
REV 03 · The Keynesian revolution
Money, cycles, knowledge, and the macroeconomic rupture
Credit, expectations, entrepreneurship, and coordination kept stressing the image of frictionless equilibrium; the Great Depression then broke the faith in self-correcting markets, and Keynes rebuilt economics around aggregates, effective demand, and rigid wages and prices, founding macroeconomics and demand management.
Other turning pointsWicksell · Fisher · Veblen · Schumpeter · Kalecki
MAC
1883—1946
John Maynard Keynes
约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯
Uncertainty, effective demand, and persistent involuntary unemployment.
INST
1899—1992
F. A. Hayek
弗里德里希·哈耶克
Dispersed knowledge, price signals, and spontaneous order.
- 051930—1970
REV 04 · The monetarist counter-revolution
Formalization, the postwar synthesis, and the monetarist counter-revolution
Economics becomes more mathematical and econometric while general equilibrium, growth, strategic interaction, and policy are rebuilt in formal models. The neoclassical synthesis of Samuelson rests on the Phillips curve; Friedman and Hayek launch the counter-revolution with the natural rate of unemployment, long-run money neutrality, and a return to laissez-faire.
Other turning pointsFrisch · Tinbergen · Haavelmo · Arrow–Debreu · Nash · Solow
INST
1910—2013
Ronald Coase
罗纳德·科斯
Transaction costs, property rights, and institutional choice.
EQ
1915—2009
Paul Samuelson
保罗·萨缪尔森
Optimization, comparative statics, and the neoclassical synthesis.
MAC
1912—2006
Milton Friedman
米尔顿·弗里德曼
Money, permanent income, expectations, and policy rules.
- 061970—2000
REV 05 · The rational-expectations revolution
Information, behavior, contracts, and institutions
Stagflation ended the confidence of the postwar synthesis, and the rational-expectations revolution rebuilt macroeconomics on individually rational choice: expectations entered the models, the Phillips curve disappeared, and anticipated policy lost its bite. Private information, cognitive limits, transaction costs, governance rules, and mechanism design moved inside the analytical core.
Other turning pointsSpence · Stiglitz · Williamson · Thaler · Hurwicz–Maskin–Myerson · Phelps · Sargent · Sraffa and the two Cambridges debate
MAC
1937—2023
Robert Lucas Jr.
小罗伯特·卢卡斯
Rational expectations, micro-foundations, and the limits of systematic policy.
INST
1940—
George Akerlof
乔治·阿克洛夫
Asymmetric information, adverse selection, and fragile markets.
BEH
1934—2024
Daniel Kahneman
丹尼尔·卡尼曼
Judgment, framing, reference points, and loss aversion.
INST
1933—2012
Elinor Ostrom
埃莉诺·奥斯特罗姆
Commons, durable rules, and polycentric self-governance.
- 071980—present
Endogenous growth, causal evidence, and complex adaptive economies
Ideas, technology, institutions, heterogeneity, experiments, causal identification, path dependence, and emergence define an expanding contemporary toolkit.
Other turning pointsAghion–Howitt · Card–Angrist–Imbens · Duflo · Acemoglu
EVO
1946—
W. Brian Arthur
威廉·布莱恩·阿瑟
Increasing returns, path dependence, learning, and emergence.
EVO
1955—
Paul Romer
保罗·罗默
Ideas, knowledge spillovers, increasing returns, and endogenous growth.